Mouse Flick

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Mouse Flick

Stuart Little, en route to the big screen in December, will stop over at Siggraph in August. But despite this appearance at the showcase for all things CG, John Dykstra, the senior visual f/x supervisor for the movie, insists that Stuart is all about character, not effects. "This is the biggest risk I've taken in a long time," says Dykstra, whose résumé stretches from Star Wars to Batman & Robin. Not just because his group worked with relatively untested animation tools - like whisker twisters and tail waggers - developed for the project. It's that in Hollywood, eye-popping, jaw-dropping, gravity-defying effects are the easy part - it's everyday reality that comes hard. And this familiar character is meant to live outside the sci-fi fantasyland of Gungan warriors, meant to look as real as Stuart's little fur-and-blood cousins, not to mention his flesh-and-blood costars.